GamesIndustry International has an excerpt from their in-depth interview with Blizzard's Rob Pardo where the World of Warcraft lead designer expresses skepticism about the "endangered species" of AAA single-player games. "I don't see there being a great business model for it these days. It's really sad, there's just a lot of elements out there that conspire to make those games difficult to make now," he says. "Between pirating or the ability for people to rent games, it's hard for publishers to pour millions and millions of dollars into a game and not necessarily see the return they need to make those budgets realistic."

I think there are lots of players like Jivaro, Prez, and myself who are largely (exclusively?) single player game players. We do it for the narrative, we do it for the experience, we do it for the immersiveness (which playing in an MMO where someone writes "kthxby, dude!, and ttyl" all the time can really take you out of).

It's like saying, "Now that people have chat clients, I don't see there being a great business model for the novel these days. There are just a lot of elements out there that conspire to make novels difficult to make now. Between libraries and PDF files on bitorrent, it's hard for publishers to pour millions of dollars into a noevel and see the return they need to make those budgets realistic."

"The worst of it all is i used to ENJOY getting excited for big titles like this, but these publishers just keep ruining my love for this wonderful hobby with their endless fuckery." - Sempai